TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

The joy of time travel isn’t to see how the world or people will look at a very distant point in time, but to find that there some concepts, pictures, artifacts, lifehacks, etc, that derive exclusively from one’s own era. Yet, what’s found is actually brought by the time traveler himself in order to save today’s artifacts and circumstances from decay, or — even better — from critique and close scrutiny . . . the time traveler becomes a smuggler: in order to stop something from being questioned, he smuggles it into the distant future, since no one is yet there to have any doubts about the many issues, ideas and controversies of our highly nontransparent age. It appears therefore, as though the real achievement of the future — its comparative advantage — is the absence of doubts, cognitive disorders, paradoxes and dissonances. There are no double binds in the future! In the future everybody cares for art and artists and we don’t even need to ask ‘why?’ . . . In the future, such questions, as well as many others, no longer exist . . .

Day 56: Jason Adams responds to Jussi Parikka, “The Alchemic Digital, The Planetary Elemental” “. . . it is the planetary computational accoutrement to the economic proper that ensures the just-in-time acquirability of the needed elements, such as the practice of High Frequency Trading (HFT) requires the development of software and hardware through which nanosecond-level… Read More »

Mohammad Salemy outlines some of the main criticisms of Accelerationism today and shares “a few insights (and perhaps critiques) in order to judge this intellectual movement from within its ranks [while providing] constructive insights on how to move forward from here”

. . . what to make of objects whose properties and relations are magical, decidedly unreal? Philosophy constitutes itself in opposition to magic; realism and rationality are understood to be incompatible with the inexplicable, unpredictable nature of wish-granting boxes, immortal apples who long for death, and other supernatural phenomena. While OOO and SR point towards a universe in which everything exists, the objects in these stories press further, insisting upon their own agency, centrality and unknowability. They are magic objects; they constitute miniature universes in which the tragedies and commonplaces of the “real” are constantly displaced by the possibility of unexpected transformation . . . [magic objects] offer an escape from the codified, knowable real, but one grounded in the reality of tangible things and the relations between them. They are magic not because of some illusionistic quality—that they are not, or something more than, what they seem—but because they possess supernatural abilities, affective and material capabilities literally beyond nature.

In order to respond to Carolyn L. Kane’s well researched history of plastic, I am expanding on the ontology of this synthetic substance and am highlighting the traces of its alien existence in various fields of knowledge by putting together a selection of images as well as introductory paragraphs from 12 wikipedia pages to reveal the extent of plastic’s penetration into our world.

What is left of Fedorov’s program after its patristic cast is demolished? Arguably, the core insights of cosmism survive intact, only cleared of obfuscation. These are: the intuition that science and technology will enable us to direct our own evolution; the recognition that this enablement is itself a feature of the machinery of the universe; and the conviction that this activity should be both the subject and object of our species’ self-education. Fedorov both expands the Museum to encompass all the data of the world, and shrinks it to the size of the individual soul. The cosmist imperative, its cosmopolitan scope, results from this enlistment of human beings by the universe, to consolidate it as a whole through their observation and participation. Human history encodes cosmic history . . . Fedorov’s incipient cosmism, too, expresses both a local and a global trajectory, the rupture of Christian particularism by a scientific universalism that it had, in part, presaged. The role of the Museum in Fedorov’s essay becomes less strained when liberated from the convolution of filial veneration, and its status as an instrument of cultural unification becomes more compelling.

An exquisite cadaver, Fidel ossified in his undead flesh, clings to and haunts dreams, a specter haunting the Caribbean, not the Marxian spectre of Communism, rather an Inquiet Spirit, walking age upon age – not unlike that monarchial exquisite corpse of England, Elizabeth and her cadaverous Prince-Consort, undead, vampires haunting the living from the age of the past century. Fidel, the end of an age, the last of the revolutionaries, takes a last undead glance over Havana as he dreams his failed revolution into the silence of the grave not yet opened to receive him, a ghastly mouth awaiting his final oneiric emission, los sueños de 26 Julio, no sería realidad; the dreams of the 26th of July will not be realized.

How can we think of something we never before thought? How can we feel it? What is the feeling of it? Actually, this was [the] question when we began trying to understand form in the time of cosmos. I think an artifact, or the form of an artifact is always somewhat unknown because it also carries a potential.

. . . while Kant and Hegel are narrated as embracing the “inhumanness within humanness”, ACC/SR/OOO is said to posit alienation as something that must be endured beyond the human entirely, since the human is incapable of encountering the alien from within the human, as remains possible in Kant and Hegel. . .Such a claim seems a strange one . . . Does Chukhrov mean to say, rather, that for ACC/SR/OOO, the noumenal is inaccessible to the phenomenal subject, which must rely instead, upon reason, mathematics, carbon-dating, and other abstractions? . . . The fact that Reza Negerastani’s concept of the “inhuman”, for instance, supports neither Chukhrov’s rhetorical choice nor the distinction it is attached to, would seem to deepen the stakes of answering these queries properly.

. . .how is it possible for human beings to be both embodied and distributed at the same time. . .? How is it that they report on the experience of an emergent whole larger than that sum of the individuals involved? More to the point, to generalize the implications of my thought experiment: in light of the reference to the term “solidarity,” how can one get individuals to spontaneously behave in accord with the best interests of all, without coercion?

If the XXI century has shown us anything, it is that it has been a very fractured one. The same can be also said about the Islamic State, which is composed by independent hubs, each one an ensemble manifested through a virtual platform and without any objective but the spread of acts of extreme violence, and a message of hate at its most elementary level . . . having wanted to destroy any resemblance of what they are against, they show themselves as the ultimate example of the object in their destructive hands. The only point they might be proving therefore is that subjectivity has ceased to exist so that, basically, we can easily conclude that they are condemning themselves.

What does it mean to leave an art world? . . . It speaks to a specific relationship to history and historicization, but also to a self-conscious positioning within an avant-garde that reveals the horizons of its possibilities, the limits of transgression and the boundaries of a community’s expectations. The myriad departures and renunciations that mark Qian Weikang and the New Measurement Group’s careers as individuals and as a group sketch not only the bounds of China’s mainstream art world but also the parameters of its avant-garde . . . their refusal of the self-conscious forms of being a contemporary artist within a domestic avant-garde, an increasingly marketized cultural sphere and, finally, within a global transnational environment demonstrates a persistent resistance to instrumentality and the collective and social life it sustains.